Matt writes about the pleasure of independent publishing on the web today:

It feels transgressive to have a website in 2017. Something about having a domain name and about coding HTML which is against the grain now. It’s something big companies do, not small groups. We’re supposed to put our content on Facebook or Medium, or keep our publishing to an email newsletter. But a website?

But he points out a tension between the longevity that you get from hosting the canonical content yourself, and the lack of unified analytics when you syndicate that content elsewhere.

There’s no simple online tool that lets me add up how many people have read a particular story on Upsideclown via the website, the RSS feed, and the email newsletter. Why not? If I add syndication to Facebook, Google, and Apple, I’m even more at sea.

I think there’s a lot of truth to this. By any objective measurement, PHP is clearly inferior to just about every other programming language out there …but its preinstalled out-of-the-box nature means it’s the path of least resistance.

If you’re trying to retrofit an existing desktop-centric site for small screens, this server-side image-resizing technique might be useful but is definitely not the right tool for a content-out, small-screen-first approach.